Indyk’s Amoral Kiss-and-Tell Story

Since talks collapsed between Israel and the Palestinians, chief U.S. negotiator Martin Indyk has already gone to the press with at least one kiss-and-tell story, about how Israel sabotaged peace through settlement building. But it seems that Indyk intends to extract still more capital from his role in the doomed negotiations. The business of manipulation and self-promotion that now surrounds the negotiation process has virtually become an end in itself, far outstripping the importance of the always-fruitless negotiations themselves. The talks seem to take place so as to allow individuals on each side to come forward with a drip feed of snippets and revelations, promoting the good will of one side, pouring condemnation on the other.

On Thursday evening, speaking at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s founders conference, Indyk offered up a serving of platitudes and obvious statements, dressed up with a particularly provocative barb about how Israel’s settlement building is supposedly risking the future of the Jewish state. Among a whole list of predictable observations, Indyk’s remark that if only the U.S. feels a sense of urgency then “the negotiations will not succeed,” seemed particularly unworthy of having been uttered. Indeed, Indyk bemoaned how leaders on both sides “don’t feel the pressing need to make gut-wrenching compromises.” Well, it’s not as if Indyk and Kerry weren’t warned of this fact before they set out on their ill-advised venture. Neither side trusts the other to think that concessions are really warranted, and yet what does Indyk imagine Israel releasing terrorists was if not “gut-wrenching”? If Indyk can be so flippant about the pain caused by these murderers going free then he has either suspended all moral judgment or is completely indifferent to Israeli suffering; perhaps both.

Some recent comments that have been widely attributed to Indyk framed the Israelis for having allegedly wrecked the peace talks through settlement building. In his speech on Thursday evening it was Israeli settlements that Indyk was especially eager to condemn. Settlements, claimed Indyk, will “drive Israel into an irreversible binational reality.”

In one sense this claim is demonstrably nonsense. The limited settlement building that has taken place has been restricted to the major settlement blocs that the consensus holds would be annexed to Israel under any final-status agreement. Yet it is also true that many proponents of the settlement project see the role of the settlements as being to block the ceding of strategically important territory to a Palestinian state that might use that territory to attack Israel from—as has been the practice in territories already surrendered by Israel. Yet there is no necessary reason why Israeli annexation of the West Bank would end Israel as a Jewish state. True, if carried out right now it would likely create an almost ungovernable situation and present a severe challenge to Israeli democracy. But the claims about demography used by Indyk/Kerry/Obama to terrorize the Israelis are increasingly being called into question. Israeli birthrates have just overtaken those of Palestinians in the West Bank and with Jewish immigration into Israel up, and Palestinian emigration remaining high, the demographic catastrophe is by no means as imminent as Indyk sounds like he hopes it is.

Still the peace process has become totemic for many, and like Kerry, Indyk is among the most pious devotees to this obsession. And so, in the course of his speech, Indyk insisted that talks could be resumed, that there is still hope for an agreement between the two sides. As ever, it is always five minutes to midnight. For the last two decades the Indyks have been telling us, one more settlement expansion, one more suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of Jerusalem, and peace will be lost forever and Israel inevitably consigned to the history books. Who knows what any of this is based on? Such claims seem as fabricated as Indyk’s suggestion that since negotiations collapsed both sides have shown restraint. But since when did restraint include the Palestinians moving to bring Hamas into the government and pushing ahead with their applications to join international bodies in direct breach of the Oslo accords?

The gap between reality and the picture Indyk and Kerry paint has become so wide that one wonders how it doesn’t simply swallow them both.

Tom Wilson is a British writer and political analyst. Formerly the Tikvah Fellow at Commentary Magazine, he is now Resident Associate Fellow at the Center for the New Middle East at the Henry Jackson Society.